When the Man Booker Prize longlist is announced, the judges are advised to don their flak jackets. Choosing 13 books from 151 means plenty of disappointed authors and carping critics. The arguments are part of the fun: all you can ask from the judges – especially at the longlist stage – is for books that are stimulating, well-written and an incitement to read.

On these terms the 2013 list succeeds amply. Some will regret the absence of former winners such as Margaret Atwood (for MaddAdam) or JM Coetzee (The Childhood of Jesus); a couple, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and David Peace, whose epic novel about Bill Shankly Red or Dead is reviewed this Saturday in the Telegraph, will likewise be missed by their advocates. But there are plenty of familiar names to discount accusations of felling tall poppies – and some less well-known ones worth picking up.

Globalisation and our connected world is a running theme. Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire follows a group of Malaysian immigrants – but rather than travelling to America, as they might have done in the past, they go to the mega-city of Shanghai. In NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, characters in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe dream of leaving the country, while Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic describes the Irish émigré experience across two centuries. Similarly epic is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, which tells the story of two brothers from Calcutta in post-war India, taking in Vietnam and the Naxalite rebellions. The New Yorker has published an extract.

Robert Macfarlane, the chair of the judges, told me that these books feel like they’re “pushing their own boundaries and squaring up to the present day,” encompassing “money, global finance and environmental disaster.” Twenty seven-year-old Eleanor Catton, whose experimental first novel The Rehearsal split the critics, returns with The Luminaries, an 800-page book about a 19th-century gold prospector in New Zealand. The environmental theme is taken up in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, about a suicidal Japanese girl caught up in a tsunami.

The most surprising choice perhaps is Richard House’s The Kills – actually four books originally published as enhanced ebooks and now collected in one volume. A crime novel that begins in wartime Iraq, Macfarlane described it to me as “challenging, complex and meta-fictional” as well as being a “self-declared thriller” – a genre that the Man Booker has been accused of snubbing in the past.

Comedic social realism gets a look-in through Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English and Eve Harris’s The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (published by the small press Sandstone). Good also to see what Jim Crace has described as his final novel, Harvest, on the list. One the Telegraph missed when it came out in January was Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart. We’ll be rectifying that oversight.

Nestled among the epics, though, one compressed masterpiece stands out. Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary retells the gospel story from Jesus’s mother’s perspective with sympathy and imagination. He’s one of our best writers but has never yet won the prize.

One fly in the ointment: five of these books haven’t yet been published and so readers wanting to sample them will have to wait. Publishers have their schedules but it doesn’t seem terribly joined-up, especially for beleaguered booksellers.